In early period of China's reform and opening up, the researcher, when studying in West Germany in 1983-1984, had a great privilege to visit the West Germany Gottengen Miniature Pig Breeding Center. The researcher learned that the miniature pig, which had been marketed in many countries and regions, was widely applied to Animal Models of Human Diseases in many western countries, and was also a great subject for the study of porcine embryonic. The Research then had the idea of introducing Gottengen Miniature Pig into China for development and application. Professor Smith, an expert in Gottengen Miniature Pig Breeding, was interested in Chinese MEISHAN pig. He suggested that the West German Ministry of Agriculture put the Gottengen Miniature Pig as a special support for bilateral cooperation, and the researchers also got support from Ministry of Agriculture after returning to China. But the plan was not carried out for various reasons, the key of which is that West Germany was reluctant to provide China the pig resources through research cooperation. In the meantime, the researcher found a large number of specific animal species such as WUZHISHAN PIG (WZSP) in China after a large-scale animal species resource investigation. WZSP are endangered species (see the Investigation Report by Feng Weiqi researcher from China Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Wang Zheng from Institute of Animal Husbandry of Guangdong Province et al, July 1987). From the data, it is showed that the miniaturization characteristics, genetic stability of WZSP are much better than that of West Germany Gottengen Miniature Pig, indicating it has promising prospects for application.
Since 1987, with the support from the Ministry of Agriculture, National Science and Technology Department of China, National Natural Science Foundation of China, et al., Institute of Animal Husbandry of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences made efforts for 20 years and invested 15 million yuan to obtain the miniature pig of WZSP for the first time in the world by using, isolating and breeding the WZSP with small size, which has been passed to the 20th generation (F20). WUZHISHAN Miniature pigs were subjected to inbred breeding for more than 10 generations from full-sib families, offspring-parent or three generations of WZSP, WZSP inbred group was obtained. The experiment proved that WZSP inbred group is highly homozygous in genes and genetically very stable and was named WZSP inbred-line (ZL02149030.9). The resulted WZSP inbred pigs have a docile temperament, clear genetic background, highly homozygous gene, black and white in color, size and coat color consistency compared to the original breeding herd. The WZSP inbred pigs also have advantages of smaller size, the genetic stability et al. compared to domestic and foreign varieties, which belong to new animal genetic resources, and have been listed as a national conservation farms (C1101001). A deep-level, multi-faceted study and exploitation as well as utilization in human Comparison medicine, such as Transplantation for Burned Skin, Cardiovascular Model, Oral Tooth Diseases, xenograft of organs and so on, are made. The result indicates: the WZSP inbred pig is not only a good source for pig breeding and high-grade meat processing, but also is the best choice for experimental animal models. WZSP inbred line will play a special role and will make a great contribution to human medical research, xenotransplantation research.